If a candidate first-AI-agent use case at an SMB cannot answer all four of (a) what does success look like in numbers, (b) who owns it on Monday, (c) what breaks if it fails silently, (d) what is the rollback — the use case is not ready to deploy, regardless of vendor demo quality or model capability.
Editorial framework piece. The four questions are derived from the most common failure modes observed across SMB-scale agent deployments through 2025-2026. Designed for a 30-minute meeting with three people; output is a one-page record. Not a substitute for vendor due diligence, risk register, or AI policy.
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About this register
The Operators register tracks claims published from practitioner-advisory pieces addressed to solo founders, micro-SMB, and small businesses up to around fifty people. Claims are reviewed on a 30–45 day cadence — tooling and SMB-relevant pricing shift faster than enterprise procurement signals.
Recent corrections in Operators
- OPS-036 · Partial · 29 Apr 2026
Initial publication 29 Apr 2026. Status set to Partial at publication because clause 6 commentary references an order-of-magnitude remediation-cost gap derived from the IAPP 2024 AI Governance Profession Report; the report characterises the gap as material but does not publish a precise multiple, so the wording is annotated source: our-estimate. REVIEW: Peter to source a precise figure or amend the commentary.
- OPS-035 · Holding · 29 Apr 2026
Initial publication 29 Apr 2026. Status set to Partial at publication because category 5 lacks the same regulatory/cited-consequence anchor as categories 1-4. REVIEW: Peter to confirm category 5 evidence base and either upgrade to Holding (with strengthened citation) or amend the claim to four categories.
- OPS-034 · Holding · 29 Apr 2026
Initial publication 29 Apr 2026 with status=partial. Cost-side claims (vendor pricing) verifiable against the four cited pricing pages on the publication date. Time-recovery claim (90+ min compressed to ~20 min) drawn from published productivity-blogger benchmarks rather than Peter-run measurement; first-cohort replication on the publication's tracked operator cohort due by 13 Jun 2026. REVIEW: Peter.
Reviews coming up in Operators
- OPS-005 · Holding · next +12d (26 May 2026)
At sub-1M tokens per month (typical SMB agent volume) in 2026, the absolute dollar gap between Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-4o…
- OPS-003 · Holding · next +12d (26 May 2026)
For a solo founder choosing exactly one consumer AI subscription at around $20/month in 2026, the choice between Claude…
- OPS-002 · Holding · next +12d (26 May 2026)
For a 5-person consultancy already on either Notion or ClickUp in 2026, the AI features alone do not justify a workspac…